Every now and again I will come across something on Twitter, that I haven't written, and think 'gee, the gals and fellas who follow me might be interested in this,' but more often than not, I don't retweet a lot. A recent report though, shows that pictures and videos will get your tweets retweetelated more often than not and add up to more retweets in the long run. Sounds like something we should look into no?

Twitter took a snapshot of their service and then cross referenced that with the number of retweets based on certain parameters including hashtags, digit, quote, photo URLs, and (most importantly for us) a video URL. This was specifically done for verified accounts in several industries including TV, music, government, sports and news.

Images and Videos Top the Retweet Chart

Video wasn't the top of the aggregate, (that was photo URL) but it was second and impressively so, topping third through fifth by almost twice as much. Video was also only about 20% less than photo URLs.

Now that's an amalgamation of all the results as I mentioned. So they broke it down into a few select industries. So for example, in TV there's a big shuffle in the effectiveness of these five factors.

Video did extremely well in the TV industry, which is not all that surprising, I mean, you need one to have the other. Quote jumped way up into first place and photo slid to third, but was still more effective in this particular category than in the overall results.

Meanwhile, in Music, things got jumbled up again. Video even won out.

Here Photo did quite well again maintaining close to the full average. Video topped it by just 3% and came in at 35% overall.

Video Retweets Losing Out in Sports, Government Categories

Oddly, in the Sports and government categories video was at the bottom and only second in the news. I guess with news it's overhyped and with government it's mostly boring. But with Sports? I figured video would generate a lot of retweets there. Maybe they just aren't putting out interesting enough clips of that latest home run or five-hole goal or whatever.

So what is it that makes video drive retweets in TV and Music but not in other areas? Is it the fact that users generally skew younger and are more interested in entertainment versus 'serious' things like the news and government? Or is it exactly what I said the first time, just not interesting enough content?

Video Retweets for TV, Music Content

In terms of TV content, theoretically you could now attempt to maximize the social spread of your tweets by including a quote and a video URL. The research didn't say anything about having combinations of elements in the tweets. It's easy enough to do in this industry, quote a show, show a clip with the quote. Naturally, the quote and the clip need to be interesting, not just any old clip and quote taken from some less-interesting or important scene. Funny quotes and clips probably work extremely well here.

Video is the be all end all factor in music industry retweets. Perhaps because they're musicians and users are used to seeing music videos. But that doesn't mean you have to only share clips of music videos or the videos themselves. You might also let the fans in a bit more and do something slightly more personal, like videos in between sets at shows or on the road from gig to gig, etc. Something that lets them gain access to you without being too intrusive. The same goes for show promoters, share those clips behind the scenes or of the latest concerts or of upcoming concerts whenever you can. That seems to be how to activate that crowd and get them to help spread the word.

Clearly whatever you do in these two industries you can certainly expand your reach and social sharing by fans with video.

I certainly hope Twitter does more research like this to see how different forms of media and allowable elements impact things via their service. More insight into how it works could bring more people and more business which is turn means we might get more innovation out of them as well.

About the Author - Christophor Rick

Christophor Rick is a freelance writer specializing in technology, new media, video games, IPTV, online video advertising and consumer electronics. His past work has included press releases, copy-writing, travel writing and journalism. He also writes novel-length and short fiction as part of Three-Faced Media . View All Posts By - Christophor Rick